"It often feels like your options are to lose yourself to your symptoms, or lose yourself beneath the side effects of the medications that correct those symptoms. Sometimes you have to reach for help, but you can break through and overcome it all."
This is what I recently submitted for a healing art showcase, a photograph and a statement explaining it, but lets talk about this more honestly. It's a mental health healing art showcase, so I kept my statement vague enough to be applicable to mental or physical health. I'm far more familiar with physical health, but right now everyone is far more interested in/focused on mental health, so I went along with it and kept my art piece and statement open to interpretation.
They also wanted it to be uplifting and inspiring, so I wrote some crap at the end there that I haven't actually managed to accomplish myself. I don't know anyone who has. This is the whole reason we want to cure the condition rather than manage the symptoms. Reaching for help, trying to overcome debilitating symptoms or medication side effects, it isn't something you can just "overcome." You have to choose which is less debilitating. Will you be able to get through life and function better with the side effects, or with the symptoms? This is a choice so many of us are forced to make. Sometimes, I can't even decide. Savella helps the fatigue for me, and nothing else does, but it also upsets my stomach very much. It basically depends on what is going on in my life at the moment, and how easily I can access a bathroom. Then again, sometimes I'm so tired I have to miss work or class because I can't wake myself up enough without it to drive that day.
Recently, Lady Gaga told everyone about her struggle with fibromyalgia. She has ups and downs like the rest of us, she has flares and she has good days, and when she is having a good day, the media likes to report that she is "recovering from her fibromyalgia." This is the kind of crap that is confusing the world, and now I'm honestly guilty of being part of the problem by making up some inspirational nonsense because that's what people want to hear. On one hand, being positive and inspirational and saying things that aren't quite right like fibromyalgia is something we can overcome, or recover from, gets more attention. It gets people to recognize it more, which is definitely a major goal right now. On the other hand, now people think that it IS something that can be overcome. Luckily, I kept mine vague, so I could have been talking about overcoming symptoms or side effects from something that IS possible to recover from, but the media sources who keep talking about Lady Gaga "recovering" are going to get a lot of people looking at the rest of us with fibromyalgia saying "why aren't YOU recovering?" or, when she does have another bad flare, fans will be furious that she had to cancel concert dates for something she has already "recovered" from.
I don't have a closing statement, here. I have no nice, neat conclusion, because that isn't how fibromyalgia works. I do encourage you to reflect on the points made here, though. Think about the pros and cons of the way you present an illness before you start talking. My other point was that sometimes you have to choose side effects over symptoms, and there are people out there who will tell you that if you are taking a medication that you know has negative side effects for you specifically, then you have a problem. It isn't that simple. If the side effects are more manageable throughout your day than the symptoms it manages, you aren't just automatically some sort of addict for continuing to take it. It's okay, you're fine.
